Friday, November 14, 2014

This BBC article summarizes the story, with relevant pictures. The scientist in the quote is Matt Taylor:

One of the leading scientists on the Rosetta Project gave a string of TV
interviews in a shirt emblazoned with half-dressed women. The angry
reaction online spawned two hashtags, spoof images and has now led to a
tearful apology as well.

The Story of the Shirt has indeed provoked lively debates online and possibly elsewhere, too. There are two major sides to these debates, and because I happen to be bilingual in this stuff, I'm going to give you the main messages of both sides, in terms which are clear to people on the other side! Isn't that useful and wonderful?

Let's begin:

First, the side which can be simplified into "women-in-science and women interested in those banned-word* issues":

Here we go again! An important public interview about the fun and excitement in science, a major moment in the history of space exploration, and women are present in leather corsets sticking out their butts and tits from the shirt. The broculture in action! It's their world and we can only visit it if we are willing to stick our butts and tits out the same way. If he had to wear a shirt with women on it, why not this one?

During an interview about the landing, Dr Taylor had branded the comet landing 'the sexiest mission there’s ever been.

'She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.'

Got that? It's good to remember that Taylor's field is covered with guys, in statistical terms. All this (and the broculture) should be kept in mind when considering the above message from one world. It's also important to remember that this shit is drip-drip-drip, nonstop, even though consisting of tiny and essentially trivial jabs in one's eyeballs and ears.

Second, the defenders of Matt Taylor. This group consists of people who think Taylor is just a bit of a goofball:

Before the
emergence of #shirtgate, Dr Taylor, a father-of-two and the son of a
brick layer, praised on Twitter for being 'a proper cool scientist' and
'definitely not boring'.

One
Twitter user wrote: 'Dr Matt Taylor is what every scientist should look
like - rad shirt, sleeve tattoos. Rad,' while another said: 'Matt
Taylor causing thousands of people to choke on their cornflakes this
morning.'

And imagine if you were given this public treatment for the way you were dressed somewhere in public (I once wore a black shoe and a blue shoe)!

The scavengers have landed on the still-warm corpse of someone who offended the feminazis! Poor guy. He didn't mean anything sexist with that shirt. He was just showing us the human side of being a scientist. At the end of this idiotic debacle he had to apologize and he was in tears, and that's the real injustice, right there.

Got that? Some people made a giant mountain out of a molehill and then tried to suffocate a well-meaning but socially inept scientist under that mountain.

And what do I conclude from all this, given my divine viewpoint?

That both sides are correct in some ways. I doubt very much that Taylor tried to explicitly make women feel that they don't belong in science, and I doubt very much that he chose to see the project as a woman who must be seduced etc in order to put women in their proper place (outside science but sexually available).

At the same time, that's the message he was broadcasting, if ever so slightly. And the reason for that is pretty obvious: The ways we define "a normal guy" and "just having fun" do not exclude shirts like that or statements like that unless you are well-versed in gender issues and the complaints linked to the broculture in STEM fields. Some people have the luxury of not having to be well-versed in those issues, and for that group the whole incident looks like people taking out a cannon to kill a mosquito on the poor man's forehead: Reactions utterly out of scale with the presumed crime.

Compare that to the drip-drip-drip aspect of all those little acts that are tilted by gender. Perhaps another mosquito parable would apply here: One mosquito you can swat away, but if you are always surrounded by a horde of them you do become rather sensitive to mosquito stings.

Whatever you might think about that, someone probably failed in organizing those interviews and in making sure that Taylor was appropriately dressed for the occasion.
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*That would be feminist. See Time magazine for more details.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

In China employment discrimination against women sounds a bit like the US of 1960s. There may be laws against it but the cultural norms don't find that much wrong with it. Still, this article suggests that times they might be a-changing.

On the other hand, removing the one-child policy could have complicated effects on the goal of gender-equality: More women are expected to take more time off from the labor market, which makes them less desirable employees, and the valuation of daughters might go down when fewer people don't have to stop at the one daughter but can keep on trying for the sun son.

On the third hand, the linked article suggests that feminist awareness is rising among the young women in China!

About 37% of Indian women have undergone sterilization procedures, the highest rate in the world, compared with 1% of Indian men. Karat said state and local governments opt for the surgeries instead of educating women — most of whom are uneducated — about other contraceptive measures.

Can that 37% figure be right? Even if it isn't, the difference between the male and female figures probably is roughly correct. When you consider the fact that female sterilization is a more invasive procedure than male vasectomy...

Of course tainted medications could have killed patients of either sex. The point is that the risk, on average, is considerably greater for women than men when it comes to sterilization.

In El Salvador abortions are illegal for any reason. Combine that with a culture which views a pregnant unmarried woman as a slut, to be shunned, and you get this:

El Salvador's ban on abortion is driving hundreds of girls who become pregnant after being raped to commit suicide every year because they see no other option, a government official said.Teenage pregnancy is one of the leading causes of suicide in the Central American country of 6 million people. Three out of eight maternal deaths in El Salvador are the result of suicide among pregnant girls under 19, latest government figures show.

Read the linked article to spot the role of the Catholic church in all that. Then think about the fact that the extreme fringe of American forced-birthers want to copy the laws and culture of El Salvador.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The speed of change online and in the media is fascinating to watch. If you turn away for a second to get your eleventh cup of coffee, you miss something crucial. For instance, the midterm elections cured the Ebola fear epidemic! They did. Now if we could only put the reason into a new vaccine.

Sigh.

I was supposed to talk about Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). They used to be people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But now they are people who bite righteous (that's how the world is and too bad but I'm able to admit it) sexists or racists in the butt, who try to steal gamer boys' inborn right to have nekked women in the computer games, to possibly pretend-rape or pretend-kill them and so on*.

They are people who try to drown the freedom of speech, to initiate that long-gray-corridors-and-slamming-metal-doors era of government communism on the free and wild cowboy Internet! Only this time the faceless bureaucrats will have a face: It's that of a leftist feminist or a revolting-disgusting-all-powerful feminazi. And yes, Virginia, SJWs can include men. Those men are called manginas (man-vaginas, which is intended to be a slur) or white knights (men who defend women, those slutty filthy vermin),

Oh my. I've spent too long in certain places online. My apologies for that. Now Andrew Sullivan (of the why-men-are-hormonally-superior-to-women fame) has jumped in the fray, with his fears that the feminazis have captured Twitter and are now removing the accounts of anyone who hates feminism. Not just accounts which are abusive, mind you, but accounts of someone erudite-in-his-hatred and not at all threatening (such as Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for Breitbart, and a self-identified leader of the Gamergate)!

What lit the fire under Sullivan's tail this time? Probably the new cooperation between WAM and Twitter:

Sullivan’s panic was occasioned by news
that the small nonprofit Women, Action and the Media, or WAM!, is
working with Twitter to try and make it more responsive to rampant
gender-based harassment. The arrangement, contrary to Sullivan’s
headline, doesn’t give WAM! power to decide what is and isn’t allowed on
the service; it simply gives the group a direct line to Twitter to
report verified cases of abuse and monitor their outcomes. “WAM! will
escalate validated reports to Twitter and track Twitter’s responses to
different kinds of gendered harassment,” says the group’s announcement.
“At the end of the pilot test period, WAM! will analyze the data
collected and use it to work with Twitter to better understand how
gendered harassment intersects with other types of harassment, how those
attacks function on their platform, and to improve Twitter’s responses
to it.”

Michelle Goldberg, the writer of that quote, then notes that Sullivan doesn'tseem to have readanything by women on onlineharassment or anything about onlineharassment in general. I spotted the same thing. He believes everybody faces exactly the same levels of death and rape threats and that everybody would manage just fine with a skin as thick as his. Given recent stories like this one and this one, I'm not at all certain that women don't have an extra helping of hatred on their online dinner plates for just being women.

I have not studied the experiment WAM has with Twitter, and I cannot judge how it is going to work, but the whole thing smells a bit like an attempt by Twitter not to follow its own ethical guidelines but to make someone else do the work. The crucial question Sullivan asks is, of course, whether accounts could be canceled for ideological reasons and not just for threatening violence or harassing someone nonstop.

But you cannot find the answer to that by asking only the people whose accounts have been canceled, just as you cannot necessarily believe someone in court who is accused of committing a crime. Yet that's exactly what Sullivan seems to be doing:

Let me know if you’ve been suspended for ideological reasons – and not
for harassment or stalking or threats of violence. And if you know of a
Twitter account that has been rightly suspended for actual threats to
individual women, ditto.

What's this all about, then? Sullivan would say it is about the freedom of expression, and he might coin himself the First Amendment Warrior.

I think a lot of this is, deep down, about the hatred of women that waxes strong inside some Twitter users. Attempts to regulate the forms that hatred takes in public are necessary, but they are not getting to the root of the problem. For note that a woman can be guilty of as little as tweeting a joke about a sports team, and down come the hordes, ready to commit imaginary vile crimes on her, to punish her for her Twitter crime. Which is to speak, especially if it is in an area others regard as properly male.

See how Sullivan and I both ended with freedom of expression concerns? He is worried about the silencing of certain voices, I point out the silencing of different voices, and the two concepts dance together. A danse macabre?

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*There's a second definition of that term, too, having to do with some Twitter groups. Goldberg refers to it in her article.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Eleven years is an elegant number, beginning with an elegant letter and very suitable for this middle-of-the-road gateway blog to feminazism and other horrors.

It's the eleventh birthday of this blog. I'm out of my mind to do something like this for eleven years, but then you knew that already. Is there going to be cake? But of course! It's going to be made out of chocolate, with whipped cream filling, and the decorations on top will be marzipan mice and chocolate snakes chasing them.

Thank you, my erudite and kind readers for these years or whatever snippets of them we have shared.

The next week or two will contain some posts that I've thought about for a long time or researched for a long time. Anniversary posts. Some of them are like prey for those predators whose yellow eyes you see glittering under the dark online trees. Some of them are just the usual boring stuff, but I hope one or two will also be fun.

My “favorite” exit polling of this election has these percentages:
78-20-26; 43-55-74. The first is the percent of white evangelical
Christians who voted
Republican, Democratic, and their percentage of the overall electorate.
The second is the result from the rest of the electorate — in short,
Democrats carried the “everybody else” cohort by a pretty good margin.
But the overwhelming support of white evangelicals, more than
one-quarter of the electorate made all the difference for Republicans.
(The white evangelical breakdown was almost identical, by the way, in
the last several elections).

To give you an idea how impressive that 26% of the electorate is: the
entire polled cohort of “people of color” — blacks, Latinos, and Asians
(other “of color” people voted, but too small a group to sample) —
totaled 23%. The people who tell you that the Christian Right has faded
are wrong. And the Republican Party will never “moderate” (whatever that
means) as long as it gets over 40% of its vote from a group that
is deeply reactionary (both socially and economically).

The so-called culture wars will be with us for a very long time, because the money boyz will need those right-wing fundies and the fundies want the gays back in the closet and the wimminfolk back in the kitchen. That is the bloody meat they will be thrown in exchange for the wallet brigade getting lower corporate taxes, corporate Internet**, fracking and so on. That marriage, between the fundies and the corporatists, is not made in heaven but it's still unlikely to lead to a divorce.

Ironically enough, the Republican Party must not "overreach" in what they offer to the white evangelical Christians. If abortion and same-sex marriage were actually made illegal the fundies would no longer have much of an incentive to vote for the Republicans.

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*I'm not sure if this is raw or adjusted exit poll data.
**Like always having the choice between an expensive but fast toll road or a free-but-slow gravel road full of potholes. What's wrong with that? Given the income inequality in the US (and the rest of the world), a lot is wrong with that. We don't usually privatize infrastructure, for fairly obvious reasons.

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